Wednesday, August 24, 2016

DONALD TRUMP, SELF-STYLED ANTI-RACIST AND REPUBLICAN PARTY LOYALIST

Guided by his new campaign leadership, the Republican nominee has ordered a full-fledged strategy to court black and Latino voters and is mobilizing scores of minority figures to advocate publicly for his candidacy.

Trump is planning trips to urban areas -- with stops at churches, charter schools and small businesses in black and Latino communities -- and is developing an empowerment agenda based on the economy and education, aides said. Under consideration is an early September visit to Detroit, where retired neurosurgeon and former Republican primary rival Ben Carson would guide him on a tour of the impoverished neighborhoods where he grew up.

[Trump] knows that his tense relationships with non-white sectors of the electorate are costing him support among one group that reliably votes for Republicans: suburban white women.

... In an attempt to lure right-leaning white female voters back into the fold, Trump launched a jaw-dropping, multi-city pander-fest designed to make himself more palatable.

But doesn't Trump risk alienating the angry white men who are his core supporters? Yes and no. I think any moderation of his immigration stance makes some of those guys less likely to turn out for him -- they're obviously not going to vote for Hillary Clinton, and they're unlikely to vote third party, but they might not show up at the polls at all if he stops feeding them red meat on immigration.

However, the general outreach to non-whites -- especially to African-Americans -- might be surprisingly appealing to some of these guys. That's because they've carefully nursed a grievance for years about racism and the two major parties.

See, for instance, the graphic below, which showed up in my Twitter feed this morning:

If you watch Fox (or even watch occasional Fox clips online), or if you lurk in the conservative precincts of the Internet, you see this sort of thing all the time.

Angry white guys love these graphics. Your Fox-watching uncle has probably posted all of these and more on Facebook. He doesn't know or care that they're full of fake facts and half-truths -- and he doesn't want to hear it when you point out that opponents of racial equality have gravitated en masse to the GOP in the past fifty years.

For the polite version of this, here's S.E. Cupp -- a conservative who's not a Trump fan -- writing yesterday about Trump's outreach campaign and past outreach gestures by Republican politicians:

Democrats are existentially threatened by a Republican’s attempt, botched or not, to creep into their territory. Any outreach is maligned. Republicans, forever accused of not caring about minorities, are scolded when they attempt to show they care about minorities.

... a Republican campaigning for President goes into a black community to talk about an important issue to many black families, and for this he is protested. Trump, for avoiding black communities and refusing an invitation to speak with the NAACP, is attacked.

If Democrats and black voters have issues with Republican policies, that’s totally fair. But squeezing Republicans into no-win scenarios, just to keep black voters from hearing what conservatives might have to say, and punishing them for trying, is just self-interested political chicanery.

This is the white anger Trump can tap into with this campaign. This actually helps keep the base angry.

A curious thing about this anger is that it's specifically party based. We're hearing a lot this year about conservative voters' distrust of the GOP -- they chose a presidential nominee who's switched parties repeatedly over the years and who doesn't always toe the party line, and they rail against the party establishment.

But this is strictly Republican vs. Democrat. On this subject, conservative base voters very much identify with the GOP.

So Trump, oddly enough, is building a little party loyalty. Who'd have thought?

10 comments:

I doubt the reichnuts love the chalkboard one - because its lesson is loud and clear and by the way backed up by the vote in the House:

Southern Dems and Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Overwhelmingly. Northern Dems and Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act. And the story was a little mixed in Border States. But beyond that the D's had a MASSIVE majority overall in 1964 and the Act would NOT have passed had the D's AS A WHOLE voted "overwhelmingly" against it. Just didn't happen.

The North voted for Civil Rights, the South voted against. And exactly zero of this had anything to do with the fact that Jefferson Davis was a Democrat.

Remember that Trump is running a 1970-80s era campaign. In those pre-internet pre-wired-world days, a huge percentage of voters paid zero attention to presidential election politics until September. In 1980, Carter had a big lead on Reagan going into the summer; then, KA-BOOM, Labor Day arrived, Reagan surged, and Carter ran out of time to catch Reagan even if he could (It reminded me of Humphrey's Happy Warrior (after Truman's Give 'Em Hell) Push in October 1968, expect in 1980 I was actively involved.).Similarly in 1988, there were actually several months before September when Dukakis led Poppy Bush - BY A BUNCH! Then September arrived, along with ubiquitous depictions of Dukakis looking stupid in a helmet perched in a tank and wall-to-wall Willie Horton.But BOTH those were, again, pre-internet, before the Information Age, pre-millinials by a quarter century. Which, IMO, is TYPICAL for the grifter mind-set, the sort that cons people on the sleazy edges of trade shows. And for a collection of certain demographics - older, white, male dominated, racist, homophobic, reflexively fundy religiotic, helmet head friendly, Southern to central Plains, rural to suburban, rundown infrastructure - I readily grant that can and often does work. What other explanation could there be for the success of Trump's Oral Roberts Tent-type Arena Crusade?

Meanwhile, go over to Sam Wang's PEC site and take a gander at what's happening: the numbers are all stretched in ways that are remarkable for late August, in ways one normally doesn't see except in the last two weeks of October in a blow-out election. Look at what has happened to the meta-margin betwen HRC and Trump; look at how rapidly Random Drift has closed to Bayesian - now 2% - and how FREAKING HIGH they're meeting at.Because neither major party could possibly have found a nominee already better known to not just the politically active and interested, not just likely voters, but every American, of voting age or not. This cake is already baked. The only questions have to with whether Trump can sustain an ILLUSION of competitiveness sufficient to ensure the GOP don't risk losing the House and have some sort of shot at keeping or keeping close the Senate.I don't think Trump can sustain it.

Daryl's other brother Ernest, OTOH Chait utterly fails to account for the millions maybe tens of millions of Stealth Trumpsters, the undisclosed, hiding in the closet or storm cellar Undercover Trump voters. the most yugest reverse Bradley effect in the history of whatever!

Trump is planning trips to urban areas -- with stops at churches, charter schools and small businesses

When during this campaign has Trump made appearances at churches, schools and small businesses? Has he done anything other than big rallies? (Yes, I know he showed up in Louisiana last week, but other than that?)

The great shift didn't begin until Lyndon Johnson signed his civil rights act.

After that, radical and liberal support for rioters that has continued to this day, along with liberal and Democratic support for the post-civil rights racial agenda that has included forced busing in northern city schools, various forms of coerced integration of private organizations, and affirmative action requirements drove a historic shift of whites away from the Democrats to the Republicans who have opposed that agenda.

Meanwhile, the loyalty of blacks to the Democrats from Johnson's time to our own has mostly had to do with what Romney said it did and to which I, for one, do not object at all.

But the racial polarization of the two major parties is mostly a result of endless leftist race-baiting propaganda that deliberately maintains an atmosphere of mutual distrust, fear, and hostility between American whites and blacks.

Many Democrats and many of their supporters, when not delusional or bigoted against whites, are merely cynical, and believe Democrats stand to gain more in the voting both than they lose by fanning the flames.

They are probably right.

The Republicans, I think and dearly hope, are about to see that Democratic theory proved true in November.